I wrote a MEL script to help me build the city within a few hours. After that I wrote a Renderman displacement shader to get the "explosion" effect. The … more »

I wrote a MEL script to help me build the city within a few hours. After that I wrote a Renderman displacement shader to get the "explosion" effect. The city was baked out into a point cloud and converted into a brickmap. The particles were created in Houdini and Shake was used for compositing.
Mehmet Erer created all the sky elements.
Development of the shot can be found here:
http://richsunproductions.info/vsfx755/cityexplosion.html « Less